Posts by Doctor Syntax 40471 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
There's an interesting parallel here as the first application for Horizon was payments of benefits for the DWP or whatever name it traded under at the time. One of my clients did some work for them. Another freelancer who had rather more dealings with that work than I did summarised them as "not the sharpest knives in the box" which more or less confirmed my own dealings with their predecessors of 3 decades earlier.
Maybe the entire shit-show is en illustration of "start as you mean to go on".
"Why Paula Vennels, plus the rest of the PO board and the Fujitsu board of the time and since, haven't already been prosecuted and imprisoned for perverting the course of justice fraud, perjury, misconduct in public office, false accounting, libel, false imprisonment."
The enquiry has shielded them. It was set up to come first, before any prosecutions of possible witnesses. It started in 2020 and is still scheduled to run at least well into 2024. If you look at the history of this you'll find that witnesses have been delayed because of delays in finding documents or delayed because a whole lot of evidence turned up just before they were due to be called so had to be put back whilst that was considered. Surprisingly some of this "newly discovered" delaying evidence turned out to be duplicates of documents already in evidence.
It would be good to think that once the enquiry is finally disposed of (and I doubt the same tactics can be continued now they've got public attention) that these delays will be investigated as obstructions of justice. Somehow, I doubt they will.
Another thing that needs looking at is how the PO were able to drag out the public enquiry the way they have. Without the ITV programme it stood every chance of going on indefinitely until nobody involved was left alive or at least mentally competent to give evidence. As it is they've not only managed to postpone getting the convictions overturned and compensation paid, they've also delayed any criminal investigation into either the business or its employees.
Too technical for the general media. The tech coverage has zero impact on the public. The Eye would be seen as fringe and probably not worth believing. The key was having an actual case won which not only provided the basis for the drama, it also avoided any risks of it being sub judice or, with the facts established in court, exposed to defamation action from the PO or Fujitsu.
Until now it's been possible for the PO to even drag out the enquiry but I doubt they'll manage to continue that stunt.
"Government can appoint administrators from private sector."
From the same pool of employees of large companies you're complaining about. Yes, I know about freelancers, I used to be one. But to un a large project you need a large team which is going to require several levels of management to coordinate it. You can't just put that together from the freelance market ad hoc.
"This is true and sadly have not been investigated yet."
No investigation needed. We know all about it. Those in post would be TUPEd over with their projects and not replaced because they "weren't needed now"
"Nobody asked the obvious follow-up - what other systems do you run?"
Actually, BT asked that question of itself. It was called the Argent project, named after a director in charge. I know because I had the job of handling it in the ruin-up to my retirement. It was handled with all the thoroughness of an ISO9000 exercise. As I'd retired by the time it was complete I've no idea of any real changes that resulted.
I can only assume that the prosecution had a word with the judge that he's been very useful to them in bringing cases against some of his former users, otherwise it seems inconceivable that he'd get off so lightly, even with guilty pleas. Either that or it was in the "too much likt hard work to bring to trial" box.
Given that these are going to consume stupid amounts of energy we need to set some rules about this:
1. The data centres to run this are to be powered entirely by sustainable energy.
2. This must be generated carbon free. Carbon offsets will not be allowed.
3. The generating capacity must be new, built specifically for this purpose and would not have been built otherwise.. Simply diverting from an existing source will not be allowed.
4. To ensure that 3 is obeyed the data centre must use only 50% of the new capacity with the other 50% supplied to the local grid.
5. Carbon offsets must be used against the CO2 released during construction of the generating capacity.
There were all sorts of strange things happening including some in the message handling system communicating between the counter and head office so that at the end of a day's trading the accounts didn't balance and the discrepancy was assumed to be the sub-postmaster's fault. Double entry book-keeping doesn't automatically keep you right but it helps to tell you when something's gone wrong and by how much. You still have to work out what went wrong or, if you're the Post Office, jump to an unwarranted conclusion.
Could you cite the cases where guilty verdicts have been given against the Post Office and a government in this case.
I agree that there could eventually be successful prosecutions brought against the PO and some of its employees in this case at which point you could say they're criminal but I'm struggling to work out what evidence and argument might be used in relation to the governments* in this case. The PO is at arm's length from government.
* Note the plural. There have been several governments, Labour, coalition and Conservative during the period this was running.
Firstly, at least in the event of a jury trial, the jury is the tribunal of fact. If the criminal rials were held before a jury then the evidence was weighed and believed by 12 members of the general public, people like you and me (unfortunately I'm above jury age now so not exactly like me).
Secondly, in the event of the evidence being one-sided, including the situation that the computer is assumed to be right unless proved otherwise, it would be very difficult for a normal* jury to come to reject it.
Thirdly, if there is expert evidence on both sides the outcome can be very different and you might be surprised at the ability of an experienced judge to evaluate evidence.. This is a long read but if you tackle it you may find it enlightening: https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/bates-v-post-office-appendix-1-1.pdf
* I have come across at least one irrational jury.
Interesting idea.
Situation1.
Contract is going to take 2 years to go live. We expire contracts every year. So half way through development the contract's expired and work stops until review is complete and contract re-let to previous incumbent. In the meantime the contractor reallocates the staff who were working on it to another contract. Contract restarts with new staff until some of the original staff can be reallocated back to it. The re-reallocated staff now have to catch up with what's happened while they were on the other contract which itself has had to cope with the influx of staff and their release.
Situation 2.
Contract is live and is processing work so the client is completely dependent on the contractor. The annual expiry date comes round. Contractor demands a massive hike in price to continue. Expiring the contract when it's in operation simply puts the clients balss in a vice and gives the handle to the contractor.
Define exploit. On first discovery it wouldn't be possible to know whether the password was a bit of stale code from a test environment as opposed to being live. The only way to determine that is to check that there's what looks like viable data at the end of it. We're not told whether he made a copy of it. We're not told that he used it for gain (other, perhaps, than doing his job and warning his client that their supplier was insecure). I find it difficult to call that exploitation.
From what I read into TFA the first court appears to have taken the reasonable approach and dismissed the case. Having a superior court toss it back at them sounds a lot like double jeopardy which has long been held to be unacceptable in English law. Although there are now exceptions where fresh evidence is available there doesn't seem to be any in this case. Does the prosecution get to appeal verdicts in Germany?
"Being on site has a lower barrier to ask someone for input/help and discussions are more direct."
Maybe I didn't understand what you were getting at but I'd understand "in office", at least in this context, as being at the employer's office but "on site" as at client site. In this context "on site" may be essential depending on the nature of the project. "In office", however, adds nothing positive and very likely plenty that's negative if the work can be done from the worker's choice of location.
"I believe some of the ad slingers have more than enough data to know i am not interested in most of those products they show me ads for"
I doubt it. It's the sort of thing they'll scrupulously not know. If push came to shove they'd need to be able to prove that they never did know such a thing.
"image-based update distribution works"
Ah, yes. I remember it well. HP-UX. We got a new coaster CD every 6 months and had to find downtime to re-install. I don't see that as being in any way a better way to update.
There was a companion Informix CD to re-install at the same time and as we had a CD set for each box we really did end up using them as coasters to the consternation of a user who came to visit me at my desk.
"the risk of upsetting tens to maybe hundreds of thousands of free users of its free distros is worth the possible benefit of making a considerably more robust OS which it can _sell_ to its big corporate clients?"
There are a lot of free distros out there. If their users didn't think Suse's were robust enough they'd jump ship. If they're the ones who make the decisions, or at least the recommendations, for the big corporate purchases and Suse alienates them they're not going to be on Suse's side when those purchasing decisions are made.
Adding what may well be perceived as a lot of weird, and therefore potentially flaky, stuff to something which is already perceived as good enough, is going to be a big point against buying it. And if the weird stuff really does prove to be flaky...
There's another point in the article which struck me, which I didn't comment on yesterday. If you're selling support and think that this improves robustness you're doing this to reduce your support costs. If, then, I'm a potential customer and look at what you're doing in that respect I'm likely to think if this is in the free edition and it's made it more robust* then why would I need to pay for the support?
Yet another alternative view is that if they system is designed to make rolling back upgrades easier if they go wrong, does it mean they're anticipating upgrades going wrong because they're planning to cut testing on them?
I suppose early encounters with Suse have left me feeling that it was a little outside the mainstream so I went Ubuntu > Debian > Devuan instead.
* This assumes I'm buying the "not robust enough to go without support" line.
"You’ll find that your employment contract states that any idea you have while working for IBM belongs to them."
OTOH if you were to leave and start a small business, say fixiing PCs, pulling network cables on contract or something and then, six months later, you suddenly have this bright idea...
"This particular study looked narrowly at product review content, and it doesn’t reflect the overall quality and helpfulness of Search for the billions of queries we see every day," a Google spokesperson told The Register post-publication.
Did he really believe that?
Did he even think his collection of words meant anything at all? The only explanation for so many PR utterances is that they don't think that. It makes them easy meat for replacement by LLMs.
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